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August 26, 2008

Mark Brillhart and Brad Allenby Are Featured Speakers at iNEMI’s Sustainability Summit

by Sam Savage

A two-day summit organized by the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) will focus the attention of the electronics supply chain on the challenges of creating a more sustainable industry. The goal of this summit, scheduled for September 22-23 in Schaumburg, Illinois, is to define specific actions for the electronics industry and to organize programs to execute these actions.

"We will look at the electronics manufacturing sector from a lifecycle point of view -- from product design through end of life," says Jim McElroy, CEO of iNEMI. "How can products be designed to minimize their impact through the lifecycle? How much energy is consumed to produce the product and, more importantly, how much will be consumed over the life of the product? How difficult will the product be to deal with at end of life? We will take a systems view across the supply chain to identify where there are major gaps - and where we think we can make a difference."

Mark Brillhart, Vice President of Manufacturing Operations for Global Supply Chain Management at Cisco, will help kick off the first day of the summit. Brillhart, a widely published author and speaker on process and materials engineering, will address how collaboration can serve as a catalyst for sustainability innovations. He'll share best practices and actionable advice for driving meaningful change through collaboration inside the organization, with supply chain partners, and across the industry.

Brillhart leads a global operation responsible for ensuring supply chain excellence, including assembly, material planning, logistics and transportation, as well as manufacturing engineering and protective packaging. His team of approximately 600 employees work in two dozen manufacturing and logistics sites around the world and are responsible for manufacturing and shipping more than 250 Cisco product lines, representing more than 120 surface mount lines, to distributors, retailers and customers.

Prior to joining Cisco in 1999, Brillhart held a variety of engineering and technical lead positions at HP, as well as research and development positions in the medical products industry. Brillhart holds 10 US patents, primarily in the fields of surgical devices and assembly processes.

Brad Allenby, of Arizona State University, is the featured speaker at the summit banquet, scheduled for the evening of September 22. Allenby has published extensively on the many aspects of industry and ecology and is a frequent speaker at industry events. His topic for the iNEMI summit -- "Journey to a Sustainable World" -- will look at the challenges and opportunities presented by the design and management of emerging technologies in a rapidly shifting social, cultural, environmental, and economic landscape.

"Most of the time, we appropriately focus on the details of the task presented to us," Allenby notes, "but every now and then it's a good idea to take a look at the context within which we're operating, especially given the accelerating rate of change of technology, natural systems, and social considerations. In fact, some scientists are now claiming that we are entering the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. That has a lot of implications for us as technologists, which we ignore at our peril."

Allenby is Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, and is also Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Law at Arizona State. He was previously Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety for AT&T. During his 20 years with AT&T, he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Allenby's principal areas of research and teaching include: design for environment, earth systems engineering and management, industrial ecology, NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technology, and cognitive sciences) convergence and technological evolution.

Additional summit speakers from industry, associations and university research programs will discuss topics that cover the full spectrum of the supply chain. The agenda has been structured to include several open discussions and brainstorming sessions, all organized around a series of panel discussions.

The summit will be held at Motorola's Galvin Center in Schaumburg, Ill. Registration is free for iNEMI members, $250 for non-members. For additional details and to register, go to http://www.inemi.org/cms/calendar/Sustainability_Summit_Sept08.html